Friday, June 19, 2015

Trust is choosing to fall and knowing you'll be there...

I’m at the point where I need to just spew, I’ve tried multiple times to write a post this month and I’m just unable to organise it into anything resembling anything coherent so here’s the ramblings of a crazed mind.

I sit here, in bed, feeling a cocktail of things I’ve never actually felt before and it’s hard. I want to throw up, I want to curl up in a ball, I want to go running, I want to talk and I want to be silent. My moods are incredibly mercurial these days. I can go through twenty emotions in as many minutes, it’s a real challenge. I was at work this evening, somewhere around eight, weeping, over nothing, thankfully no-one else was around to see it. Then, just like that I was happy again.

I did the maths, it’s been eight years. That blew my mind. Eight years since I’ve felt… “Human”, that’s how my housemates put it. How they cope I don’t know, I’m on top of everything one moment and a moping sniffing wreck the next. It’s rather incongruous behaviour, at best.

I feel like a huge mess, but, that is what I’ve figured out so far.

I had a moment where I was at the front of church about a month or two ago, at an altar call, I’d been feeling depressed for months again, I was sick of it. I just wanted it gone and it went…Be careful what you wish/pray for folks, you just might get it. I sure didn't feel ready to handle it what came next, let me tell you that!

I’d been numb for a few months, run down, drained and unhappy with brief moments of ecstatic joy puncturing my sad existence, it usually involved coffee or animals, sometimes both.

Anyway, when I awoke the next morning I felt everything at once, and it was too much… Ever been swimming and got water stuck in your ear so bad you go deaf and then when it finally drains it sounds like the whole world is screaming and you have to adjust to how loud everything is? It’s like that. Just with, you know, feelings.

Needless to say I emotionally face planted many time, like a deer learning to walk. Truthfully, I still do.

I’m still quite unsteady, quite afraid, I wore armour so tightly for so long that I forgot I was made of flesh and bone and am allowed to feel… No, still not used to that yet.

What if I feel the wrong thing though? I’d had friends abandon me before, simply because I felt the ‘wrong thing’... Where’s the guide for this sorta stuff? Surely someone has a specification for how you work these feelings? Is there not some settings I can adjust?

I was depressed, but I was balanced, subdued but consistent. I was unhappy, but I knew how to cope with that.

Now every day is an adventure in a new combination of feelings and experiences, it’s confusing, it’s hard and I almost wish, almost, that I still had all the armour around me, it created a barrier, but it kept me contained, but don’t think for a moment that the armour was there to protect me, it’s much too late for that, my armour was keeping my together. Now it’s gone I feel like I’ve burst out in all directions and it’s scary. Especially since I’ve lost a few good friends this year. It’s just freaking terrifying.

In the midst of my fear however, I’ve experienced kindness, acceptance, and it scares me to think I might lose that. So, in that way I’m learning to trust, sometimes small little things, sometimes huge confessions of massive insecurities, other times it’s waking up and speaking of the nightmarish place my brain had gone to while I’d been sleeping.

Amanda Palmer once described trust this way “I trust you this much… Should I? Show me!”

I like this, but trust isn’t a one time thing, trust is a totally counter intuitive series of moment to moment choices to believe a person when they say something. When someone tells you something, it isn’t invalidated by their absence or silence or anything, I’m learning that you can’t trust someone and ask for constant reassurance. Trust requires something of me, trust is absolutely two way, I can’t say I trust you and then never give you opportunities to demonstrate that trust.

Cards on the table, I want to be better at it, I’ve made progress, I can see it in myself, but I want to be better still.

So, another lesson is learn who is trustworthy, I’ve made that mistake a few times before, hopefully I’ve gotten better at it. I hope to not find myself feeling the same sense of loss and trying, once more, to piece the broken bits back together again.

I mean, I’ve only just now figured out how it is that things are supposed to be in the first place.

I’m reminded of the movie the Shawshank Redemption, the tagline is ‘Fear can hold you prisoner, hope can set you free’, eight years… Eight years, and I’m making plans, maybe not big ones, but there’s events I look forward to now, I find that I feel I can lift my head (sometimes with tears streaming down my face) and have hope in things. Hope that there’s a good things coming.

I hope that the future is as bright as it seems today, I really hope it is.

Because a little hope is a dangerous thing, now that I have a hope for my future, I don’t want to return to feeling numb and hiding myself away, even though that’s the most comfortable thing to do right now.

Today I choose to trust, and tomorrow and the next day… Can I do that? Show me.